Towel-Folding Robot Could Fix Laundry Woes

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Towel-Folding Robot Could Fix Laundry Woes

Folding clothes is the worst part of doing laundry. But if you can be patient enough, a small robot might be able to do the job for you.

A team of researchers from University of California Berkeley have created a mechanical marvel that can pick up a towel from a pile of laundry, fold it (with an inhuman level of concentration) and stack it.

The robot is an attempt to demonstrate the machine's ability to perceive and manipulate "deformable objects," say the researchers.

Most robots today work in places where they can perform tasks that are precise and repetitive. And these work environments are very carefully structured and controlled, say doctoral student Jeremy Maitin-Shepard and Assistant Professor Pieter Abbeel, of Berkeley's department of electrical engineering and computer sciences. The towel-folding robot hopes to show that robots can work in unstructured places and with objects that are not rigid.

The towel-folding robot has been built using Willow Garage's PR2 robot and has four cameras.

Here's how the robot breaks down the towel-folding process. Using its arms, the robot picks up the towel and flips it around slowly in the air. The machine's high-resolution cameras then scan the towel to estimate its shape. Once the robot finds two adjacent corners, it begins the folding process and lays its on a flat surface to complete it. The best part is that the robot actually smooths the towel after every fold.

Creating a machine that can all do that is relatively simple from a robotics point view, says the researchers. The trick lies is in the robot's ability to pick up a towel from a pile of clothes.

Current computer-vision techniques were primarily developed for rigid objects and can't handle variations in three-dimensional shape, appearance and texture that can occur with a towel or a sock, say the researchers. To beat that, the Berkeley team developed a new computer vision-based approach for detecting the key points on the cloth for the robot to grasp.

And so far, the robot is working very well. In about 50 trials attempted on previously-unseen towels with variations in appearance, material and size, the robot did a swell job, say the researchers, who will present their report (.pdf) at the the International Conference on Robotics and Automation 2010 in May.

Nifty as it sounds, be prepared for a long wait if you want that pile of towels folded. The robot took an average of 1,478 seconds – or nearly 25 minutes – to fold each towel.